Filecoin Solstice upgrade is live at epoch 6,470,279
Filecoin's Solstice upgrade, network version 29, is live at epoch 6,470,279. New sectors get 10× power, but the block-reward burn waits until quarter two.
Filecoin's network version 29, Solstice, is already on mainnet, and the burn meant to absorb unused service rewards is not scheduled in quarter one. At 07:12:30 UTC on October 21, 2026, the public Glif Lotus gateway returned network version 29 and chain head epoch 6,475,345. The tipset at epoch 6,470,279 carries 2026-10-19T12:59:30Z, the instant Lotus v1.37.0 set. Giving every new sector the old Filecoin Plus multiplier looks like a capacity subsidy. FIP-0118 keeps the offsetting burn at zero until quarter two, the opposite of a fee burn that rises when a chain is busy. The specification compares the split to Bittensor-style networks that divide a fixed emission by governed weights. Gas rewards still go entirely to the winning miner.
Lotus v1.37.0, published on October 6, 2026, is mandatory. It installs built-in actors v19.0.1 and retires datacap minting and Fil+ allocations. A new sector gets 10× quality-adjusted power for its life, immediately, whatever it stores. Existing sectors keep their power unless the provider runs the upgrade-quality command. The initial pledge formula is unchanged. DataCap and verified-registry writes fail, and a batch pre-commit that still carries deal ids is refused. StateMinerInitialPledgeCollateral errors. Operators pass the full sector size as the verified size to StateMinerInitialPledgeForSector.
How the block reward now splits
The reward actor splits each newly minted block reward. Consensus weight starts at 95% and falls to a 50% floor over nine quarters, five percentage points a quarter. The migration slope is minus 0.45 over nine quarters of 262,974 epochs, 91.31 days on the FIP's arithmetic. Service weight starts at 5%. In quarter one it equals one minus the consensus weight, so it reaches 10% as quarter two starts and no burn is scheduled. From quarter two it rises by five percentage points only if aggregated Filecoin Pay volume clears a dollar gate, to a 50% cap. There are eight gates. The first gate, from 10% to 15%, is $3,500. Each later target is 2.7 times the last. The FIP calls that $3,500 entry a calibration to Filecoin Pay actuals at a FIL price of $1. That is a parameter note, not a spot print. CoinGecko showed Filecoin (FIL) at $1.037 at 07:16:42 UTC on October 21, 2026.
One quarter after activation is epoch 6,733,253, 20:26:30 UTC on January 18, 2027. The first gate evaluates quarter two. FIP-0118 says a step above 10% lands at the earliest about 17 days after that quarter ends.
What clients shipped around the fork
Lotus v1.38.0, published on October 12, 2026, is recommended, not required for a node already on v1.37.0. eth_call and eth_estimateGas honor a positive gas cap, and the gateway caps a JSON-RPC body at 16MiB. Lotus v1.38.2, on October 20, patches splitstore memory after a snapshot import and does not move the height.
Christian Taylor's September 23 note lists Forest v0.38.0, Venus v1.21.1 and Curio v1.29.0 beside Lotus. Steve Loeppky, the other named coordinator, wrote on October 7, 2026 that the epoch was 6,470,279 at 12:59:30 UTC on October 19. Filecoin's blog, published at 19:00 UTC that day, says unallocated rewards burn when a gate is missed and skips the quarter-one pause. The Final FIP does not skip that pause.
Solstice marks Filecoin’s economic turning point, much like the astronomical solstice marks a shift in the season, moving the network from rewarding raw capacity toward measurable, paid on-chain services tied to real demand, with unused allocation burned when that demand is not there.
Christian Taylor, an upgrade coordinator on the network-updates thread, wrote that on September 23, 2026. The weight table delays that burn until quarter two.
What a custodian books after the height
A node without the new actor bundle diverges at activation. Lotus scheduled the pre-migration 120 epochs, one hour, earlier, at 11:59:30 UTC on October 19. Its September 18, 2026 benchmark, a 64-thread AMD EPYC 7282 with 503GiB of RAM and NVMe, took about 64 seconds before the epoch and about 63 seconds at the epoch, peaking around 38 GiB. FilMined still stores the grand minted total, so miner income is that figure minus the burn and the service-stream counters.
Elsewhere, the IoTeX Zanzibar hard fork pays voter rewards on chain, DATA Network's plan to retire its chain leaves the ledger, and Blast's wind-down followed costs that outran revenue.
The figure to watch is quarter two's Filecoin Pay volume against the $3,500 gate. A pass can move the service weight from 10% to 15% after the timelock. The October 19 post says the upgrade does not guarantee customers.
This article is informational analysis only and is not financial, investment, or trading advice. Cryptocurrencies are highly volatile and can lose substantial value rapidly. Past performance and historical patterns do not guarantee future results. Do your own research and consult a regulated financial adviser before making any investment decision.
Reporting by Karthik Subramanian. Filed 21 October 2026, 12:33 GMT.
Digital Assets Correspondent
Karthik Subramanian is a founder, writer, and technology consultant with nine years in the crypto ecosystem.
